This story reminds me of the classic tale, legend or not, of NASA engineers spending millions of dollars to create a pen that could write in zero gravity. The Russians had the exact same problem. Their solution? They used pencils. $0.00 R&D.
In this story, the "Russians", are stores like EBGames and Gamestop (using games as an example.) How did they combat this very real, complicated, and expensive issue?
They took the DVDs out of the cases. Thieves get an empty box for their trouble.
Um, that CNet "review" is dated June 15, 2006!!! Yahoo has been "announcing" a new site for over a year now.
I think you get a free registration with your copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
Right, but if all things are equal, Walmart wins. If the manufacturer sets a $14.99 pricepoint (which they won't, the point is still for make them money, they just don't want product dumped and sold for LESS than wholesale, which is the point of many sales. but for the sake of argument) then Walmart can sell that for $15.01 and still make money, whereas the smaller shops can't move that much product, and thus have to sell for more, and thus buyers will go to Walmart to buy the thing.
"Wal-Mart alone would lobby that one right into the stratosphere."
uh, no they wouldn't. In fact it's directly in their interests for just such a thing to happen. Walmart doesn't sell below cost, they buy in such huge bulk that they can profitably sell for mere pennies over cost.
This would be just the thing to help them crush the remaining small town stores, and without having to use a bulldozer.
So was it in "Civil War: Confessions"? or "Civil War: Frontline"? "Civil War: Aftermath"? Or did it go in "Captain America: Civil War: Aftermath"? Or did they get tricky, stick it in "Iron Man: Civil War: Confession: Aftermath"? Or maybe only in the "Variant Cover" edition?
I know it wasn't in the two week old finale of "Civil War", that'd be too easy.
god I hate comics.
Re:um. slight spoiler for THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CARE
on
Captain America Dead at 66
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A: It isn't OUT yet. That's the point. It's been dragging on for a year and the big boffo resolution is a MONTH AWAY. Of course I hate that crap. I want good art and good writing, not crappy marketing and delayed schedules and cheap headline grabbing. Marvel screwed me and their customers on this more than anyone else, absolutely.
If Slashdot were the only folks carrying it, no problem. But every major media outlet has it, so Google News has it, so everyone has it, at a glance, in the headline.
You want perspective, that's what the examples were for. No way in hell a spoiler for Heroes or Lost or 24 would show up in the headline of mainstream news.
But because its comics, oh no big deal, what are you whining about, blah blah. Remember that the next time you tape a "big game" and someone spills the score before you can watch. Or whatever it is you love that you feel is better than this.
Maybe I'm just pissed because I was really hoping it would be Reed Richards who'd get capped.
Some folks, those who actually read comics, have been slogging through this particular story arc for the better part of a year. One of those frustrating "cross-over" event stories, that involves every comic on the shelf, so there's no escape.
A Year. A year of waiting and guessing and theorizing about the big ending, which is still a month or so away.
So now, the ONLY people who give a crap just got a big steaming pile of **SPOILER** handed to them thanks to a too-soon press release and an unthinking media that, in spite of a multi-Billion dollar comic book movie market, still thinks no one's reading them enough to care if they ruin entire plots in the headlines.
Jack Bauer Dies on 24 This Season!
Lost Is Really On An Alien Planet!
The Cheerleader Dies on Heroes!
Harry Potter Becomes Evil In Final Book!
you'd figure at least here in geek-land, a little more care would be taken.
Oh.my.god. Using those figures, according to my calculations, it takes the light from the sun about eight minutes to reach Earth. That means, we aren't seeing the Sun NOW, we're seeing the sun eight minutes in the PAST. So everything we're seeing, everything with the Sun's light on it, is actually touching the past! I'm.. I'm touching the PAST. Looking through TIME.
"Sampathkumar and his colleagues built upon 20-year-old findings..."
whew. good thing no one will be able to do that with their freshly-patented findings.
"Yes. uh huh, yes, I know. But sir, wait, please slow down. Sir? Sir? Yes, ok, as I explained to you already, yes. I know, I looked at your research, and I agree, you do seem to have found a cure for cancer. It looks good, solid. Unfortunately, you violated several of our patents to do so. Yes.. yes sir I understand your frustration, but we aren't selling licenses at this time. Well sir, because honestly; a "cure"? Why would we want that? We're looking for something a little more viable, you know, in the long term. Something along the lines of a "lifetime treatment", requiring daily doses. Hopefully several daily doses, if our scientists can swing that. I don't know what you were thinking sir, a cure? That just doesn't help anyone at all. Do not call this office again. Good day."
It's hilarious that you mock that particular Lone Gunmen episode for not being correctly prophetic for something so marginal as the chip for their computer. It's like chastising a tv show for the characters always knowing exactly how to cock, reload, aim and use an assault rifle.
That episode, by the way, was about terrorists hijacking a commercial plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center. It aired like six months before 9/11. Makes me wonder what sort of other depressing crap those other movies are going to get right.
If only we had one of those new Octium 4's. indeed.
If only. But "Web 2.0" isn't just for MySpace. User created content pretty much defines FLICKR, for example. But Flickr has decided to keep a quite narrow field of what can be posted and viewable in the public areas. Adult materials, nudity and sex, those are out. But also interestingly, so are "non-photos", such as screenshots or artwork. Flickr wants to be a family-friendly photo site, thus the content allowed is only photos. As the user base grows, it will be interesting to see if they can keep that narrow focus.
Not to mention, Yahoo hasn't figured out how to make money with Flickr yet. That may throw it all into chaos, who knows.
"But judge, the only way I could get the exclusive pre-release video of [hyper-hyped band/singer-songwriter/pretty face] was to steal random music from a P2P service. I didn't want to, I obey the law and have never stolen anything in my life. But [record label] would only hide the must-have exclusive video in fake song files. I didn't know which songs they were, or which ones were fake or real. So I had to download several thousand of them to finally find the video."
Pre-orders. PRE-ORDERS?! Are you f#%@ing KIDDING ME?! They can't con any more stupid rich people, so they wanna go for the stupid non-rich? If anyone, ANYONE, plunks down money for this thing that they don't actually have in their hands, then they deserve what they get.
Ever since I first saw footage of Unreal3 tech, coincidentally three years ago, I've been blown away at the technology. Ever since, Unreal3 tech has only evolved and matured into a truly impressive movie generator. From the recent Gears of War shorts, to the surreal and stunning Bioshock short film, no other technology has been so widely accepted and used to generate authentic movies that look just like videogames.
I look forward to many more years of high quality, high definition films coming from this amazing technology. There are rumors that a future version may in some way be interactive, but for now they're just rumors. It is truly a great time to be a videogame viewer.
Back to my earlier point, we already ARE the test subjects for law-enforcement weaponry. non-lethal or non-non-lethal (so, lethal.) I personally just found it refreshing that the military for one rare moment didn't consider an American life worth approx 5-10 insert-foreign-bystander-here lives.
"Enjoy your "hot seat" while you're sitting in the bus stuck behind the protestors, and in the line of the beam."
I'm already happy to dodge bullets if the cops want to stay with the lethal methods on those scrawny vegan whiners, so semi-cooked innards doesn't seem as harsh for the cause.
"Who is this enemy they are developing these "non-lethal" weapons for?"
Um. Anyone that we would otherwise be using LETHAL weapons on?
You know, this is constantly done within civilian law enforcement. A new baton comes out, lighter yet stronger and more compact, they roll it out in a few "test precincts" to see how it performs. The Tazer(tm), same thing, it rolled out slowly before now being used by most law enforcement agencies in the U.S. You know there have been literally thousands if incidents where the police reported that if they didn't have the non-lethal options of mace and/or a Tazer, they would have had to resort to lethal force?
And like the Tazer and mace, there are plenty of opportunities for misuse.
But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about our military finding themselves in more situations in the coming decades where mixed innocent/combatant crowd situations are going to be more common. And they're saying that they're trying to find ways to deal with those that are slightly less fluffy than pillows, but at least a little less deadly than death.
And if those f&$king nike-wearing, abercrombie&fitch-logo-sporting "protesters" want to have themselves another party/riot in downtown Seattle and block my bus route while they're kickin' in a Starbucks window while gulping down a Seattle's Best Latte, I say field test away.
I bought a "smart" phone off eBay, it was a good deal, works great. Turns out the old user was a doctor. I know this because, even though he had figured out how to erase his messages and crap, the thing was set up on his hospital's corporate wifi email system, with portable Outlook. The first time I got online (do you know how cool it is that all the pubs in my neighborhood have free wifi now? it's very cool.) It reached out and REFILLED the inbox with hundreds of VERY personal emails (his and his patients), including attachments.
I have no idea what any of the xrays were trying to show me, but he seemed pretty concerned about some spots in a couple of them. I thought it was cool I could zoom in on them with my phone. Man I hope copies are being kept on the server...
sigh. again, how does this refute my point? Forget for a moment your obsession with Mr. Colbert. How about the way more subtle, less distinguished entries, like a lowly senator from Nebraska? Someone with a nice normal nondescript name changes something subtle, erases a DUI or compaign contribution controversy. Ten more nondescript people "here-here" it, over the course of whatever course makes that sort of thing not very noticeable. Or the area of "exploratory drilling" in anwar is slowly shrunk a few hundred square miles at a time, until the number everyone cites is so warm and fuzzy that everyone thinks it'll be fine if we go drill there. and by everyone I mean everyone too lazy to look up stats and figures beyond their wikipedia search on anwar.
How do you recognize something as vandalism, if it seems to be true as far as you know?
so it wasn't noticed because he announced it, it was noticed because he's popular (As Colbert pointed out, there's a larger entry in Wikipedia for him than for "Lutheran".) Not sure how that negates my point, or his.
Good job. Did you happen to do a search for Senator Steve Dalton, or CEO Colton Firth? No?
ok I made those up. Too lazy to look up actual senator names. point is, Colbert's point in fact, isn't that you guys can't fix the stuff you're looking for, it's that you can't fix the stuff you're NOT looking for. If he had chosen to not go on the air with his joke, then "wikiality" would actually show that his opinion has always been that Oregon is Idaho's Portugal (not Washington's Mexico, or California's Canada, both of which he actually said). No one would have noticed, but it would be up there as "wikifact" anyway.
Of course the elephant stuff was going to be instantly caught, everyone was watching. But what about the entries on no-name senators who maybe want to be president some day? No fanfare, just little edits here and there to change stupid things they said, stupid votes they made, stupid DUIs they committed.
As a Wikipedia defender commented: "..and if you find that Wikipedia has poor information about something, you can improve it yourself!"
yes. that's it exactly.
No compaints, just the highest suicide rate
on
EA Spouse Outed
·
· Score: 1
Yah those Japanese, they stick it out, so why shouldn't we? They live in boxes barely the size of my closet, so why shouldn't we? They off themselves via stress-related suicide faster than any other culture, starting in grade school, so why shouldn't we? They have the second highest per-capita smoking population outside of China, so why shouldn't we? They show hardcore pornography (live and anime) on daytime tv, so why shouldn't we?
ok that last one I'd probably be fine with.
If you want to emulate another culture's work ethic, why not pick someplace in Europe? Four day work weeks, two MONTH vacations each year, and STILL hardcore porn on tv.
You want to work yourself to death for whatever shallow sucess you perceive is important to you, knock yourself out. Darwin awards workaholics as easily as guys playing catch with power tools.
At which point in your life did you suddenly realize that you were a highly skilled, trained professional? How did your skills miraculously appear? Mine came from almost 35 years of applying myself and learning skills. You can't pick up a paintbrush and just be an artist, nor can you be "talented" at something and still excel without studying and training. Most people I know with money didn't just find it, they spent years scrimping and saving and investing. Most people I know with possessions didn't get them all at once, they spent their lives gathering them.
You may live in a world of right-place-right-time, look good when the boss is looking and move up, but I think most of us had to spend our lives for our rewards.
Slashdot Mirror
um. "Legends" aren't false. Or rather, they are by nature.
Anecdote stands.
Point stands.
Slashdot Geek level stands.
This story reminds me of the classic tale, legend or not, of NASA engineers spending millions of dollars to create a pen that could write in zero gravity. The Russians had the exact same problem. Their solution? They used pencils. $0.00 R&D.
In this story, the "Russians", are stores like EBGames and Gamestop (using games as an example.) How did they combat this very real, complicated, and expensive issue?
They took the DVDs out of the cases. Thieves get an empty box for their trouble.
$0.00 R&D.
Um, that CNet "review" is dated June 15, 2006!!! Yahoo has been "announcing" a new site for over a year now. I think you get a free registration with your copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
Vonage! We can't guarantee we'll be here tomorrow, but we promise great service today!
[Sign up for a 3 or 5 year plan, pay in advance, and earn a special reserved seating package for all future Vonage court proceedings!]
Right, but if all things are equal, Walmart wins. If the manufacturer sets a $14.99 pricepoint (which they won't, the point is still for make them money, they just don't want product dumped and sold for LESS than wholesale, which is the point of many sales. but for the sake of argument) then Walmart can sell that for $15.01 and still make money, whereas the smaller shops can't move that much product, and thus have to sell for more, and thus buyers will go to Walmart to buy the thing.
In all things, Walmart would win.
"Wal-Mart alone would lobby that one right into the stratosphere." uh, no they wouldn't. In fact it's directly in their interests for just such a thing to happen. Walmart doesn't sell below cost, they buy in such huge bulk that they can profitably sell for mere pennies over cost. This would be just the thing to help them crush the remaining small town stores, and without having to use a bulldozer.
So was it in "Civil War: Confessions"? or "Civil War: Frontline"? "Civil War: Aftermath"? Or did it go in "Captain America: Civil War: Aftermath"? Or did they get tricky, stick it in "Iron Man: Civil War: Confession: Aftermath"? Or maybe only in the "Variant Cover" edition?
I know it wasn't in the two week old finale of "Civil War", that'd be too easy.
god I hate comics.
A: It isn't OUT yet. That's the point. It's been dragging on for a year and the big boffo resolution is a MONTH AWAY. Of course I hate that crap. I want good art and good writing, not crappy marketing and delayed schedules and cheap headline grabbing. Marvel screwed me and their customers on this more than anyone else, absolutely.
If Slashdot were the only folks carrying it, no problem. But every major media outlet has it, so Google News has it, so everyone has it, at a glance, in the headline.
You want perspective, that's what the examples were for. No way in hell a spoiler for Heroes or Lost or 24 would show up in the headline of mainstream news.
But because its comics, oh no big deal, what are you whining about, blah blah. Remember that the next time you tape a "big game" and someone spills the score before you can watch. Or whatever it is you love that you feel is better than this.
Maybe I'm just pissed because I was really hoping it would be Reed Richards who'd get capped.
Some folks, those who actually read comics, have been slogging through this particular story arc for the better part of a year. One of those frustrating "cross-over" event stories, that involves every comic on the shelf, so there's no escape.
A Year. A year of waiting and guessing and theorizing about the big ending, which is still a month or so away.
So now, the ONLY people who give a crap just got a big steaming pile of **SPOILER** handed to them thanks to a too-soon press release and an unthinking media that, in spite of a multi-Billion dollar comic book movie market, still thinks no one's reading them enough to care if they ruin entire plots in the headlines.
Jack Bauer Dies on 24 This Season!
Lost Is Really On An Alien Planet!
The Cheerleader Dies on Heroes!
Harry Potter Becomes Evil In Final Book!
you'd figure at least here in geek-land, a little more care would be taken.
Oh.my.god. Using those figures, according to my calculations, it takes the light from the sun about eight minutes to reach Earth. That means, we aren't seeing the Sun NOW, we're seeing the sun eight minutes in the PAST. So everything we're seeing, everything with the Sun's light on it, is actually touching the past! I'm.. I'm touching the PAST. Looking through TIME.
these are really good brownies.
"Sampathkumar and his colleagues built upon 20-year-old findings..."
whew. good thing no one will be able to do that with their freshly-patented findings.
"Yes. uh huh, yes, I know. But sir, wait, please slow down. Sir? Sir? Yes, ok, as I explained to you already, yes. I know, I looked at your research, and I agree, you do seem to have found a cure for cancer. It looks good, solid. Unfortunately, you violated several of our patents to do so. Yes.. yes sir I understand your frustration, but we aren't selling licenses at this time. Well sir, because honestly; a "cure"? Why would we want that? We're looking for something a little more viable, you know, in the long term. Something along the lines of a "lifetime treatment", requiring daily doses. Hopefully several daily doses, if our scientists can swing that. I don't know what you were thinking sir, a cure? That just doesn't help anyone at all. Do not call this office again. Good day."
It's hilarious that you mock that particular Lone Gunmen episode for not being correctly prophetic for something so marginal as the chip for their computer. It's like chastising a tv show for the characters always knowing exactly how to cock, reload, aim and use an assault rifle.
That episode, by the way, was about terrorists hijacking a commercial plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center. It aired like six months before 9/11. Makes me wonder what sort of other depressing crap those other movies are going to get right.
If only we had one of those new Octium 4's. indeed.
"Let the users post whatever CONTENT they wish."
If only. But "Web 2.0" isn't just for MySpace. User created content pretty much defines FLICKR, for example. But Flickr has decided to keep a quite narrow field of what can be posted and viewable in the public areas. Adult materials, nudity and sex, those are out. But also interestingly, so are "non-photos", such as screenshots or artwork. Flickr wants to be a family-friendly photo site, thus the content allowed is only photos. As the user base grows, it will be interesting to see if they can keep that narrow focus.
Not to mention, Yahoo hasn't figured out how to make money with Flickr yet. That may throw it all into chaos, who knows.
"But judge, the only way I could get the exclusive pre-release video of [hyper-hyped band/singer-songwriter/pretty face] was to steal random music from a P2P service. I didn't want to, I obey the law and have never stolen anything in my life. But [record label] would only hide the must-have exclusive video in fake song files. I didn't know which songs they were, or which ones were fake or real. So I had to download several thousand of them to finally find the video."
Case dismissed.
Pre-orders. PRE-ORDERS?! Are you f#%@ing KIDDING ME?! They can't con any more stupid rich people, so they wanna go for the stupid non-rich? If anyone, ANYONE, plunks down money for this thing that they don't actually have in their hands, then they deserve what they get.
Which, if you need a reminder, is in the name.
Phantom.
Ever since I first saw footage of Unreal3 tech, coincidentally three years ago, I've been blown away at the technology. Ever since, Unreal3 tech has only evolved and matured into a truly impressive movie generator. From the recent Gears of War shorts, to the surreal and stunning Bioshock short film, no other technology has been so widely accepted and used to generate authentic movies that look just like videogames.
I look forward to many more years of high quality, high definition films coming from this amazing technology. There are rumors that a future version may in some way be interactive, but for now they're just rumors. It is truly a great time to be a videogame viewer.
Back to my earlier point, we already ARE the test subjects for law-enforcement weaponry. non-lethal or non-non-lethal (so, lethal.) I personally just found it refreshing that the military for one rare moment didn't consider an American life worth approx 5-10 insert-foreign-bystander-here lives.
"Enjoy your "hot seat" while you're sitting in the bus stuck behind the protestors, and in the line of the beam."
I'm already happy to dodge bullets if the cops want to stay with the lethal methods on those scrawny vegan whiners, so semi-cooked innards doesn't seem as harsh for the cause.
"Who is this enemy they are developing these "non-lethal" weapons for?"
Um. Anyone that we would otherwise be using LETHAL weapons on?
You know, this is constantly done within civilian law enforcement. A new baton comes out, lighter yet stronger and more compact, they roll it out in a few "test precincts" to see how it performs. The Tazer(tm), same thing, it rolled out slowly before now being used by most law enforcement agencies in the U.S. You know there have been literally thousands if incidents where the police reported that if they didn't have the non-lethal options of mace and/or a Tazer, they would have had to resort to lethal force?
And like the Tazer and mace, there are plenty of opportunities for misuse.
But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about our military finding themselves in more situations in the coming decades where mixed innocent/combatant crowd situations are going to be more common. And they're saying that they're trying to find ways to deal with those that are slightly less fluffy than pillows, but at least a little less deadly than death.
And if those f&$king nike-wearing, abercrombie&fitch-logo-sporting "protesters" want to have themselves another party/riot in downtown Seattle and block my bus route while they're kickin' in a Starbucks window while gulping down a Seattle's Best Latte, I say field test away.
I bought a "smart" phone off eBay, it was a good deal, works great. Turns out the old user was a doctor. I know this because, even though he had figured out how to erase his messages and crap, the thing was set up on his hospital's corporate wifi email system, with portable Outlook. The first time I got online (do you know how cool it is that all the pubs in my neighborhood have free wifi now? it's very cool.) It reached out and REFILLED the inbox with hundreds of VERY personal emails (his and his patients), including attachments.
I have no idea what any of the xrays were trying to show me, but he seemed pretty concerned about some spots in a couple of them. I thought it was cool I could zoom in on them with my phone. Man I hope copies are being kept on the server...
sigh. again, how does this refute my point? Forget for a moment your obsession with Mr. Colbert. How about the way more subtle, less distinguished entries, like a lowly senator from Nebraska? Someone with a nice normal nondescript name changes something subtle, erases a DUI or compaign contribution controversy. Ten more nondescript people "here-here" it, over the course of whatever course makes that sort of thing not very noticeable. Or the area of "exploratory drilling" in anwar is slowly shrunk a few hundred square miles at a time, until the number everyone cites is so warm and fuzzy that everyone thinks it'll be fine if we go drill there. and by everyone I mean everyone too lazy to look up stats and figures beyond their wikipedia search on anwar.
How do you recognize something as vandalism, if it seems to be true as far as you know?
so it wasn't noticed because he announced it, it was noticed because he's popular (As Colbert pointed out, there's a larger entry in Wikipedia for him than for "Lutheran".) Not sure how that negates my point, or his.
Good job. Did you happen to do a search for Senator Steve Dalton, or CEO Colton Firth? No?
ok I made those up. Too lazy to look up actual senator names. point is, Colbert's point in fact, isn't that you guys can't fix the stuff you're looking for, it's that you can't fix the stuff you're NOT looking for. If he had chosen to not go on the air with his joke, then "wikiality" would actually show that his opinion has always been that Oregon is Idaho's Portugal (not Washington's Mexico, or California's Canada, both of which he actually said). No one would have noticed, but it would be up there as "wikifact" anyway.
Of course the elephant stuff was going to be instantly caught, everyone was watching. But what about the entries on no-name senators who maybe want to be president some day? No fanfare, just little edits here and there to change stupid things they said, stupid votes they made, stupid DUIs they committed.
As a Wikipedia defender commented: "..and if you find that Wikipedia has poor information about something, you can improve it yourself!"
yes. that's it exactly.
Yah those Japanese, they stick it out, so why shouldn't we? They live in boxes barely the size of my closet, so why shouldn't we? They off themselves via stress-related suicide faster than any other culture, starting in grade school, so why shouldn't we? They have the second highest per-capita smoking population outside of China, so why shouldn't we? They show hardcore pornography (live and anime) on daytime tv, so why shouldn't we?
ok that last one I'd probably be fine with.
If you want to emulate another culture's work ethic, why not pick someplace in Europe? Four day work weeks, two MONTH vacations each year, and STILL hardcore porn on tv.
You want to work yourself to death for whatever shallow sucess you perceive is important to you, knock yourself out. Darwin awards workaholics as easily as guys playing catch with power tools.
At which point in your life did you suddenly realize that you were a highly skilled, trained professional? How did your skills miraculously appear? Mine came from almost 35 years of applying myself and learning skills. You can't pick up a paintbrush and just be an artist, nor can you be "talented" at something and still excel without studying and training. Most people I know with money didn't just find it, they spent years scrimping and saving and investing. Most people I know with possessions didn't get them all at once, they spent their lives gathering them.
You may live in a world of right-place-right-time, look good when the boss is looking and move up, but I think most of us had to spend our lives for our rewards.
Just like the church of WoW teaches us.